(And editor) Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime, Free Press (New York, NY), 1998.

SIDELIGHTS: Harold Shukman is a scholar of Russian history, chiefly concerned with the twentieth century. His work includes histories of the Bolshevik revolution, encyclopedias, and especially translations of noted Russian historians and fiction writers. In a Russian Review consideration of Shukman's The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution, Donald J. Raleigh praised the work for its "high quality" and noted that it "deserves recognition precisely because it meets the need for a general reference work of high quality on the revolution." Much the same could be said for the rest of Shukman's books, which bear in mind both scholarly aims and general interest.

Shukman has also been recognized for his translations of biographies by the late Colonel-General Dmitri Volkogonov, a Russian military historian who, as a government archivist, had unprecedented access to top-secret documents from the regimes of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky. Shukman's translations offer to English-speaking readers "provocative [works] for the specialist as well as many a casual student of world affairs," to quote New Leader contributor Anatole Shub. In a Tribune Books review of Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, Mark Kramer wrote that Shukman "has done an admirable job of preserving the elegance and detail of the original Russian version while eliminating many (though not all) of the repetitive passages and digressions. Some minor mistakes arise, but overall the book makes for splendid reading."

Other critics have expressed gratitude for translations of Volkogonov's writings because the Russian author was able to access new information that shed light on the more gruesome aspects of modern Russian history. Kramer, for instance, concluded that Volkogonov's works are "a major step forward in our understanding of . . . the early years of the Soviet regime. . . . [He] brings to an American audience the finest reassessments of Soviet history we are likely to have for many years to come."

Shukman once told CA: "The accident of having Yiddish-speaking Russian parents was responsible for my being propelled into Russian studies in general and aspects of Russian-Jewish history in particular. Otherwise I might have remained in a career with a future—electronics. However, the discovery of the French and Italian languages in 1950-51 coupled with eruption of late adolescent sensuality, diverted me into the vain search for a profession offering culture, luxury, wealth, and ego gratification. An Oxfordian enjoys only one of these all the time, and at most two some of the time."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, December, 1969, pp. 546-547.

Nation, May 28, 1988, pp. 746-748; March 25, 1996, pp. 31-32.

National Review, December 31, 1994, p. 57.

New Leader, December 19, 1994, article by Anatole Shub, pp. 28-31.

New Republic, March 18, 1996, pp. 41-45.

New Yorker, April 16, 1984, p. 160.

New York Review of Books, June 15, 1967, p. 23; April 4, 1996, pp. 38-41.

New York Times Book Review, April 1, 1990, p. 7; November 13, 1994, pp. 11-12; March 24, 1996, p. 9.

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